Nutty by nature
With an upcoming live-action TV debut, Marvel's quirkiest superhero, Squirrel Girl, is firmly in the spotlight.
SHE took down Doctor Doom in her very first adventure. She dated Wolverine and then defeated him in one-on-one combat after that! She has defeated supervillains like M.O.D.O.K., Kraven the Hunter, Deadpool, Thanos, and even Galactus!
Just who is this seemingly unbeatable hero, this amazing character who has managed to vex some of Marvel’s most powerful heroes and villains?
Why, it’s the unbeatable Squirrel Girl, of course!
Wait, what? Squirrel who? Yes, Squirrel Girl, the amazing superhero with the powers of a squirrel! She can leap tall trees in a single bound (and climb, hop and skip on them too)! She has the proportionate strength of a squirrel (which comes in handy when you need to lift really big nuts)! She has a little knuckle spike to fight with (and claws that are really useful for climbing trees)! She has pouches full of nuts she eats for extra energy (macadamia nuts are “great for extra pep”, apparently)! And best of all, she can talk to squirrels!
OK, so Squirrel Girl’s powers aren’t as cool as, say, Storm, Phoenix, Captain Marvel, or even Jubilee’s (who shoots fireworks out of her hands, can you believe it). But we weren’t kidding about the “unbeatable” part.
Doreen Green, aka Squirrel Girl, has been taking down major supervillains since she made her first appearance in 1991’s Marvel Super-Heroes (Vol 2) #8, in an Iron Man short story that was written by Will Murray and drawn by the legendary Steve Ditko. It was meant to be a light-hearted joke of a story, but little did Murray and Ditko know that their nutty creation would become one of Marvel’s most quirkily endearing characters ....
In that story, Doreen ambushes Tony Stark as he is flying through a forest and asks to be his partner. Unsurprisingly, Tony isn’t too impressed with her power set (“Not exactly in Wolverine’s class, are you?”), but he soon changes his mind when Doctor Doom himself shows up and kidnaps both of them in his Doomship.
But never fear, Squirrel Girl is here! Calling upon her rodent friends for help, the combined powers of a thousand woodland creatures soon confounds Dr Doom enough for him to abandon ship and run away! And thus, the legend of the unbeatable Squirrel Girl is born!
The nutty Avengers
Unfortunately, it took more than 10 years for her legend to continue.
Consigned to obscurity and used mostly as an in-joke by Marvel writers, she finally got another break in 2005 when she joined the Avengers!
Wait, what do you mean she technically didn’t join the Avengers? She actually joined the Great Lake Avengers? Oh.
The Great Lake Avengers (GLA) is a jokey knock-off Avengers team based in Milwaukee and comprising a bunch of “heroes” with rather useless powers. Among them are Mr Immortal (he can’t die), Flatman (he’s flat), Big Bertha (she’s big), Doorman (he’s a doo ... no, wait, he creates teleportation “doors”), and human Pterosaur Dinah Soar (dino-saur, geddit?).
Anyway, Squirrel Girl makes her bow in 2005’s GLA #1, breaking the fourth wall to introduce readers to the new four-issue miniseries written by Dan Slott. Joining her on her comeback is Monkey Joe, her “squirrel partner” who was also introduced in that first Iron Man story.
Tragically, Monkey Joe dies in
GLA #3 (the series is a send-up of comic book tropes, and has one character die in each of its four issues), but Squirrel Girl gets a new sidekick in #4, Tippy Toe, who has, happily, stayed alive until today.
After the GLA series ended, Squirrel Girl went back into hibernation for another couple of years until 2011, when she is reintroduced into the Marvel canon and joins the New Avengers!
Wait, what? She didn’t join THIS team either? Then why is she interviewed by Luke Cage in New
Avengers (Vol 2) #7?
As it turns out, Squirrel Girl was not interviewed to become part of the team but, rather, to become the nanny for Cage and Jessica Jones’ daughter, Danielle Cage.
Well, if you’re going to hire a nanny for the daughter of two superheroes, you could do worse than hiring a superhero who is unbeatable, right?
While being a nanny doesn’t usually put Squirrel Girl in the thick of the action, she does get to show off her skills during the Fear
Itself crossover (New Avengers #15).
Not only does she have to defend Danielle against a horde of Thule Society soldiers, in a flashback, she even gets to whoop Wolverine’s butt in a one-on-one fight. Fun fact: earlier in the series, it was also revealed that Logan and Squirrel Girl actually had a fling in the past! In the 2015 reboot of the New
Avengers title, she eventually joins the new team, thus making her, officially, an Avenger! (Tippy Toe is also a member, making her the first ever squirrel Avenger!) Squirrel Girl has since stayed on with the team even after its change to the U.S.Avengers.
Going solo
In 2015, 24 years after making her debut, comic book fans all over the world rejoiced as Marvel’s most unbeatable superhero finally got her own solo series! Woohoo!
OK, fine, when the series was first announced, The Unbeatable
Squirrel Girl wasn’t exactly the most anticipated new title in the Marvel lineup. Heck, it probably wasn’t even in the top 10 of most fans’ lists.
All credit to the creative team of writer Ryan North and artist Erica Henderson, though, who have turned it into one of Marvel’s most consistently brilliant and funny titles. It even won an award for Best Publication for Teens (ages 13-17) at last year’s Eisners (the comics industry’s equivalent of the Oscars). While The Unbeatable Squirrel
Girl still isn’t as popular as some of Marvel’s bigger titles, it’s a great example of how superhero comics don’t always have to be about major crossover events or nonstop superhero action all the time. Combining tongue-in-cheek humour, a mockery of comic book tropes, amusingly cartoonish art, and genuinely funny scripts and stories, the series has managed to chug on even in the face of some of Marvel’s major universe-changing events.
In it, Doreen finally takes Iron Man’s advice from all those years ago and enrols in college, studying computer science, of all things. There, she meets roommate and new best friend Nancy Whitehead, who has the power of sarcasm and cat whispering (what do you mean those aren’t superpowers)? Also part of the cast of genuinely likeable characters in the series are Chipmunk Hunk (powers: able to talk to chipmunks), Koi Boi (powers: able to talk to fish) and Brain Drain (a former supervillain created in 1975 who is essentially a super brain in a robot body. He is defeated by Squirrel Girl because his software is obsolete. But after Doreen and Nancy help update his software, he decides to become a hero instead. Hooray for the powers of computer science!).
Since getting her own series, Squirrel Girl has continued her unbeaten streak against Marvel’s worst villains. She defeated Kraven the Hunter (she convinced him to go hunt giant sea monsters instead), Galactus (she convinced him to eat nuts instead of planets – true story), a dinosaur Ultron (she used computer science again!) and even an evil Asgardian squirrel god named Ratatoskr. (Fun fact: Ratatoskr is an actual figure in Norse mythology.)
Heck, she is so unbeatable that she even got her own Deadpoolesque Squirrel Girl Beats Up The Marvel Universe standalone graphic novel last year.
And she’s also set to make her live action debut in the upcoming
New Warriors TV series (in which she will be played by Milana Vayntrub of This Is Us).
Not bad for a superhero who was created as a joke, eh?